Could someone who understands the science explain how excited I, as someone passionate about clean energy, should be about this, or how big a grain of salt I should take it with?
However it will still take decades (if ever) to turn this into a working electric power system.
We solved the problem of using fusion to create vast amounts of energy in a short amount of time half a century ago, but the primary application for that approach is excavation (and all ways that word can be applied euphemistically), not energy production.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there haven't been "over unity" announcements before this -- aside from bombs. The Q of 1.5 here is the story. All Qs before have been under 1.
It's very strange to read that we get Q=0.67 in 1997 in a tokomak, and then Q=1.5 in 2022 with a totally different laser inertial confinement design. That... seems to be the written history.
I know Iter would be surpassing the record, but the timelines are long to the point that one loses hope in the project.
To me the major question is if once fusion is viable (assuming we get there) if it can compete on a cost basis with renewables (yes, base load etc).
Why spend all of the money to create and sustain a fusion reaction in a gravitationally subcritical environment when there is a giant perpetual fusion engine running on gravitational criticality alone a scant 93 million miles away?
Just throw down more collectors, improve storage, and call it a day.
More meat on those bones for a sustainable future, to my money.
If your position is that we're spending too much money on fusion research, and not enough storage and solar, perhaps you could share what you think we're spending on those things, and propose a better allocation?
But as a power source?
When the conversation moves to "So when can I run my own fusion reactor in my basement," I tune out given that I can install my own self-sufficiency solar array in my backyard right now. The energy exchange from fusion to electricity problem is already solved as long as one isn't constraining one's fusion source to a truly exotic configuration that is rarely seen in nature (given how common and powerful gravitationally-induced fusion is).
I'll be pleasantly surprised if we get to the point where fusion power generation is commercially viable, but practically speaking that's likely something for my grandkids to get excited about, at the earliest... While we can do the photovoltaics installations right now.
And no, it's not 10-15 years away, you can buy a battery backed PV system with well over a night's storage capacity today from a large number of vendors. Search for Hybrid PV systems.
Because Fusion and Gen IV Fission the kind of tech that would also dramatically improve standards of living.
Renewables + storage essentially keeps the present day standards of living without CO2 emissions. Big deal. That proposition won't convince the very high IQ people you need to drop from Wall St. and FAAMG.
People work to improve their standards of living, thinking that it would be possible to mount a global effort to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of people who'd be alive 200 years from now is a proposition which is solely realistic in the minds of naive and monodimensional people like the Greta Thumberg, Extinction rebellion etc.
Our biggest example of how to make fusion work involves a gigantic gravity well, which we are not going to produce on Earth without some very theoretical (and, if made practical, very dangerous) technology.
I'm unclear on how either fusion or Gen-IV fission would improve our standard of living though. Can you give some examples? This is an angle I haven't heard. The average American household (at least) already has all the energy it needs running into it; can't really put much more in without giving the average American household the energy density needed to blow up their neighborhood, which I don't think improves our standard of living.
NIF is a scientific demonstration facility, not in any way designed to be a power plant, nor should it be. it’s wasteful to build a steam turbine and boiler and efficient lasers when you haven’t even demonstrated ignition yet. Now that they have ignition, they can start thinking about the power plant a little bit more. But they still need to increase the gain to like 25-50 by leveraging ignition.
Article on an actual power plant demo follow on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#M...
Fusion promises the energy density of fission (traditional nuclear power) with very-little/none of nuclear waste and dirty bomb problems. Compared to oil/coal, fusion is free and clean energy. Compared to traditional nuclear, fusion is ~99.99% free and clean energy.
This is the first little ember of that promise of fusion power. It's going to take a lot more research and time, but they have proved that it is possible. It's all 'just' engineering from here. Think 1-4 decades.
It's not a working plant by any means. But if this continues apace, your children are likely to spend most of their lives in a world with free and clean energy for all the nations of the Earth. Energy so abundant and clean that your children will be able to reverse climate change by powering machines to filter out all the excess CO2, for starters. After that, who knows?